Monday, June 07, 2010

You probably know what Photoshop disasters look like, but your photos can benefit from more subtle and elegant touch-ups. With these tools and techniques, you can sharpen, texturize, re-contextualize, and remove tourists, among other problems, from your shots worth saving.

10. Create Your Own Bokeh

Bokeh is a cute name for something you've noticed before, but probably never really pinned down—the gauzy, creamy light points that appear behind the subject that's in drastic focus in a picture. Photo site DIY Photography explains how to harness and control bokeh effects, using a photo lens like a 50mm F/1.8 and creating a small lens cover with just the right kind of hole cut out. Lacking for the right kind of digital lens? The Photojojo blog details an analog-to-digital lens adaptation, perfect for garage sale and eBay finds. (Original posts: Bokeh, DSLR lenses).

7. De-Pixelize Graphics and Small Photos

Resizing images is grunt work enough—having to deal with pixelated results is just torture. Free webapp VectorMagic can make your graphic-style images into vector art that scales clean and smooth as it's sized up and down. It works better with clean line drawings and small, icon-like photos than full-size shots, but if you can tolerate some loss of detail, it's a lifesaver. (Original post).

6. Make Photos Look Like Miniatures with Tilt-Shift Tools

With tilt-shift photography, you can put being 50 rows back from the action to your advantage. A professional lens can run upwards of $1,200 for a very single-use tool, so try some DIY solutions. MAKE shows us a DIY lens that looks like it's made from, of all things, a plunger. There are also two web-based software tilt-shift solutions: Tiltshift Maker and TiltShift—we prefer the latter for its options and control, but the mostly automated Tiltshift Maker also gets the job done in simple fashion. (Original posts: DIY lens, TiltShiftMaker, TiltShift)

5. Use Textures to Liven Up Flat Images

For whatever reason, perfectly fine photos can lack definition. Sometimes it's tricks of light and lens, and sometimes it's because Cousin Jeff wore a sweater that just turns out like a blob. Try adding textures to a photo with layering techniques. A scanned sheet of white paper, for example, saved an otherwise washed-out photo in Digital Photography School's example. It's not a save-all, and definitely has potential for abuse, but it's a nice saving grace to have in your mental back pocket. (Original post).

What image edits or Photoshop tricks are a regular part of your photo-fixing repertoire? What editing techniques would you like to see covered or explained in the future? We're all ears in the comments.